Exhibition

Future of Visions - DON'T EXPECT ANYTHING

Visionary elements and the potential of the visual are showcased in the EMAF 2016 exhibition at the Kunsthalle Osnabrück.

The artistic positions contained in this international group exhibition develop strong aesthetic forms for their critical examination of concepts of the future. A core element of all of works showcased in the exhibition is the question concerning the significance/value of humans in a future world, their needs and uniqueness. An entire section is devoted to the future of viewing, or visions of the visual.

The exhibition was curated by Herman Nöring and Franz Reimer.

Kunsthalle Osnabrück

Hasemauer 1, Osnabrück

The Long Now

Verena Friedrich / DE / 2015

Whenever we contemplate the future, we must inevitably address the question of time. How long does the present last? Is it possible to conserve the fragile present, and when will it become a memory bubble? Just like animals, humans do not actually have a sensory system for the past and for the future. Consequently, we obsessively attempt to preserve the present, to prolong our existence, and to approach immortality. This is to be achieved in a Faustian pact with science, medicine and technology. Verena Friedrich has found a contemporary three-dimensional image for this quest. With considerable technological effort, she prolongs the life of a soap bubble, known in art history since the 17th century as a symbol of impermanence.

Metronome Instruction (Etude Series)

Ji-Nin Lai / TW / 2015

Cultural development is linked to the measurement and clocking of time. While initially undertaken by tower clocks, factory sirens and train timetables, today it is atomic clocks and satellite signals that lay down time structures and dictate process throughout the world, down to the smallest village. Computer programs and their performance capability are also dependent on time bundles, on the clock frequency of chips, the further increase of which will have an almost eerie impact on human culture. In the exhibition room, Ji-Nin Lai’s manipulated metronome provides a beat with variations that are determined by a small mechanism.

Future

Esther Hunziker / CH / 2014

Film history as a reflection of our exploration of the future: FUTURE is a 6-hour science fiction video consisting only of text. It features all of the titles of science fiction films made between 1900 and 2013, in alphabetical order. Reduced to the titles, an index of a fictional world passes before our eyes; featuring terms related to fears, hopes, disasters, idle dreams, illusions, the supernatural, reorganisation & revolution, machines, brains, genes, sex, power and death...

Firmamentum Continuitas

Esteban Rivera / D/RUS / 2016

Firmamentum Continuitas is a fictional film about Gennady Baranov, an ex-cosmonaut that used to have undercover interviews with the pope Paul VI. They tried to decide how big the universe was and where exactly, stated in lights-years, the metaphorical heaven of the religion begins. On may 1967 arrives a letter from the Vatican to the Cosmonaut Training Center in Zvyozdny Gorodok. The letter said that they were worried about the decline of the territory of the christian's heaven and the space colonization expansion. Gennady Baranov was sent to negotiate with them.

How to Nature

Leonie Link / DE / 2015

Due to the abundance it offers, the internet stirs longings; at the same time, the internet offers us lots ofpathsthat enable us to disappear into virtual worlds. The desire for technological progress is replaced by a new search for nature, romance, religion and apocalypse. How real or how virtual is this search within tis space and the experiences gained? As virtual as the computer-generated images and the techno voice that asks questions such as ”How can tattoos be removed?” or ”Do you have experiences or do the experiences have you?” in Leonie Link’s installation.

Uterus Man

Lu Yang / CN / 2013

The super hero of the future looks like a uterus and fights his enemies with ”ova light waves”, often deploying an aggressive foetus in the process. Uterus Man, this transhuman, androgynous manga character, typifies a potential world beyond the human. A world determined by technoid figures, man/machine beings or merely algorithms; a world in which humanity is merely a life science construct.

Delusional Mandala

Lu Yang / CN / 2015

The super hero of the future looks like a uterus and fights his enemies with ”ova light waves”, often deploying an aggressive foetus in the process. Uterus Man, this transhuman, androgynous manga character, typifies a potential world beyond the human. A world determined by technoid figures, man/machine beings or merely algorithms; a world in which humanity is merely a life science construct.

Maximum Power II

Bastian Hoffmann / DE / 2014 (KHM_section)

Everyday objects and events play a central role in Bastian Hoffmann’s work. In his 2015 work Eden was Never so Close, he presented a tower of fruit crates that soared unsteadily into the nave of the Kunsthalle. In this work, too, the artist explores the unknown possibilities of common objects. He questions a car and the automobile company about their utopian content. ”With his sculptural interventions and witty twists on our idea of reality, Bastian Hoffmann sets the observer back to his own horizon of perception, and leaves it up to him to ask the right questions.”(Förderpreis des Landes NRW 2015)

Recruitment

Avi Krispin / ISR/NL / 2015

How will political populists act in future? As the front man of a glam rock band? As the ”supreme leader” who – stepping out of a horse – seeks to manipulate the audience and to win it over as a passive mass for his objectives? In Avi Krispin’s work, the media-affine pop cult and the political circus enter into a synthesis. Other members of the ”band” are placarded in the city of Osnabrück as mundane blokes sporting glam rock outfits.

The Brotherhood

Federico Solmi / IT/USA / 2015

In his adopted city of New York, the Italian Federico Solmi is considered the superstar of video and installation art. Using gaudy ornamentation and kitsch colours, he parodies the poses and display rituals of potentates and dictators. With his mix of images from games, pop culture and the internet, he wants to encourage us to think about the present.

Deep Love Algorithm

Francis Hunger / DE / 2013

We experience unrequited love between the journalist Jan and the writer Margret. She is portrayed as a young woman, but is actually an octogenarian cyborg. On a kind of journey through time, she and Jan visit the places that are relevantfor databases. In ”Deep Love Algorithm”, Francis Hunger explores the history and evolution of big data in the socio-political context of post-Fordism. Hunger conveys an image of databases that penetrate our everyday lives, placelessly and invisibly, and that form the backbone of digital societies.

Die Mauer – Der Vertikale Horizont

Rotraut Pape / DE / 2015

As with a burning glass, in her long-term project, Rotraut Pape enables the audience to observe the massive architectural transformation of Berlin in a concentrated manner. The filmmaker spent the last 25 years repeatedly pacing up and down part of the course of the Berlin Wall with a camera, documenting how rapidly and how extensively this distinct city landmark has changed. The Berlin Wall was representative of a dictatorship forced onto the population as a vision of society. After the collapse of the Wall, it evolved from a death strip into an area of turbo capitalist development and profit forecasts set in concrete.

Sirènes / Short Walk

Emmanuel Trousse / MC / 2015

A person walks into the sea, another follows suit. One after another, they stride towards the horizon and disappear in the water, which opens up a realm of opportunities, hopes and destruction. Driven by will, instinct or external pressure, they come up against the power of the elements. Their determined yet stumbling gait and their mysterious disappearance are a constant reminder that that it is people, i.e. living beings, who (are forced to) seek their future in the sea.

Frozen Time

Ali Chakav / IR/DE / 2015 (KHM_section)

”... and a number of people were killed at today’s demonstration ...”An announcement just like a hundred others we receive from the media each day? How different would it be if you found yourself in the midst of the catastrophic event and then heard about the announcement? How do these two perceptions differ? This project is an attempt to recount such an experience.The sniper shot right into my friend’s forehead. Although the bullet struck, he survived. After two years, however, bullet fragments became dislodged in the brain, and killed him.

In The Future They Ate From The Finest Porcelain

Larissa Sansour & Søren Lind / Palästina/UK / 2015

A group of resistance fighters seeks to change a state’s political history by intervening in the future perception of that state. They bury fine porcelain in the country, enabling them to claim later on that it belongs to a fictitious advanced civilisation that must have settled in this region some time past. The aim of these ”narrative terrorists” is to redefine the nation’s history by retrospectively ”injecting” the past and underpinning future ownership claims with a mythical narrative. Despite being completely fictitious, there appears to be nothing unusual about this ”historic activist” strategy in Larissa Sansour’s country of birth, Palestine.

JLM Inc.

Jennifer Lyn Morone / UK / 2014

Bye bye data slavery! Many services on the internet are supposedly free of charge. However, users all too often pay with their personal data. It’s not only Facebook, Google and Amazon that tap into our data and use it in all kinds of ways – data has generally become a goldmine of information capitalism. The artist Jennifer LynMorone turns the tables and enters her data in the company Jennifer LynMorone™ Inc. so as to be able to market all her own physical, geographical and activity data under her own control. As such, Jennifer LynMorone practises – in her own words – an ”extreme form of capitalism” in which only the market value of an individual counts.

Translantics

Britta Thie / D / 2015

In the six-part web series „Transatlantics“, the artist Britta Thie sheds light on the inner conflict of a generation that moves between its analogue past and modern aestheticism. In the midst of virtuality, internationality and simultaneousness, three young women are missing a coherent identity. The audiovisual means of representation generate a distinct impression of hyperreality.

What Do Machines Sing Of?

Martin Backes / DE / 2015

”Do machines have feelings? And would we be worried if they did? Artificial intelligence, and whether it can have feelings, is the subject of wide debate at present. The artist Martin Backes approaches this debate in a truly individual way — by having an algorithm cover love songs. A black screen with white letters flickering across it, just like in karaoke. A suggested mouth moves synchronously with the lyrics of the song displayed on the screen. We cannot hear a voice, just a distorted sound. But it is enough for us to instantly recognise the song after a couple of notes: Whitney Houston’s ”I Will Always Love You”. Sung not by her, but by an algorithm.” (Wired)

Jacobson's Fabulous Olfactometer

Susanna Hertrich / DE / 2014

How can we accelerate human evolution or compensate for our shortcomings? In today’s world of environmental toxins and extreme living conditions, humans need a sensory organ that can be used to spot odourless chemicals. Featuring satirical undertones, Susanna Hertrich has constructed fictitious wearables with an aim to stimulating debate on the contemporary use of technology. Hertrich’s work can be comprehended as an artistic hypothesis that focuses on the extension of the natural human body. Using contemporary forms of technology, new transhuman, sensory extensions can be made that blur the transition between man and machine.

Gedanken um die Bundesanwaltschaft

Damian Weber / DE / 2015 (KHM_section)

The performer Elisabeth Pleß sings the student folksong ”Die Gedanken sind frei” (Thoughts are free) while cycling around the offices of the Public Prosecutor General in Karlsruhe. However, Pleß sings the song backwards, meaning that all those who pass her by and who could otherwise hear her are unable to understand the meaning of the song. It seems as though, by adopting this secret language, she is giving even greater protection to her thoughts, as though the lyrics she would sing if she were to sing them comprehensibly no longer applied. The lyrics are only deciphered in the video, which plays the documentation of the performance backwards.

Tangible Memorial

Julia König / DE / 2015 (KHM_section)

We stroke, hug, nudge and caress them. We have entered an intimate relationship with the screens around us. For many centuries, the custom of touching objects to bring us luck and make our wishes come true has been kept alive in various cultures. TANGIBLE MEMORIAL explores the fifth and, now perhaps, first sense: touch.

Several artists will talk about their artworks and their intention at the Kunsthalle Osnabrück on Friday and Saturday during the festival!

Also Britta Thie talks about "Translantics", 23 April, 19.00 h

Kunst-Quartier

Bierstr. 33, Osnabrück

Beat Box

Wolfgang Oelze / DE / 2015

Sound poetry of breakdowns and disasters is showcased in this room installation. In a double projection, the video depicts and composes technical disturbances that the artist found in feature films. The sound tracks of the film excerpts activate the strings of an electric guitar via a small loudspeaker. The distorted sound of the guitar heard in the room is therefore played live by the videos. In addition, a video track generates a drum track for the second video, and vice versa.

Stadtgalerie + Café

Große Gildewart 14, Osnabrück

Mensch-Sein

Under the leadership of Monika Witte, students from Osnabrück Music & Art School come together in their examination of the human species to develop a room installation that broaches the issue of being human: Are humans just organic machines that can hope to become immortal in future, thanks to medical and technical progress? Will the biological body and, in particular, the heart, where our emotional thoughts and the “soul” lie, be required in future? Will the biological body and the mind continue to constitute an entity in future?

Media Campus Exhibition:

From Full Dome to VR-Video

The experimental exploration of the immersive medium Virtual Reality. Detached from the real world, exploring virtual space, progressive media artists endeavour to prise open new levels of perception.In collaboration with the Hessen State University of Art and Design (HfG Offenbach), we present a selection of VR projects on data glasses. (Kunsthalle/monastery vault)